Contending discourses of black autobiography: respectability, authenticity, and masculinity release_tvz2t42dm5hxvb2u5okgbjtehq

by Anthony Foy

Published in Ilha do Desterro by Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC).

2021   Volume 74

Abstract

After historicizing the politics of racial representation in the slave narrative, this article considers how race, gender, and class intersect historically in the autobiographical production of Black men in the United States. At the dawn of the Jim Crow era, Black autobiography conformed to a cultural politics of racial synecdoche, which avowed that racial progress depended on the respectability of esteemed individuals. Dominated by aspirational figures who presented themselves as racial emblems, Black autobiography became closely aligned with the imperatives of Black middle-class formation, actuating a discrete form of racial publicity that erected disciplinary boundaries around Black self-presentation and silenced disreputable figures. With the emergence of criminal and sexual self-reference, whether subtle or striking, in the narratives of Black men, autobiographers like boxer Jack Johnson, scholar J. Saunders Redding, and writer Claude Brown, disrupted the class-bound constraints that had determined Black autobiographical production, staging an internecine class struggle over the terms of racial representation—that is, between contending discourses of racial respectability and racial authenticity
In application/xml+jats format

Archived Files and Locations

application/pdf  297.4 kB
file_stk2lcbmkzapzkje3szxvixcya
periodicos.ufsc.br (web)
web.archive.org (webarchive)
Read Archived PDF
Preserved and Accessible
Type  article-journal
Stage   published
Date   2021-06-07
Container Metadata
Open Access Publication
In DOAJ
In ISSN ROAD
In Keepers Registry
ISSN-L:  0101-4846
Work Entity
access all versions, variants, and formats of this works (eg, pre-prints)
Catalog Record
Revision: 0b48a97d-4de1-4f93-ada5-b93718fc3950
API URL: JSON